


You'll Remember

by tanyart



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Ghosts, Insanity, M/M, Minor Character Death, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-08
Updated: 2013-08-08
Packaged: 2017-12-22 20:27:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/917689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tanyart/pseuds/tanyart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something is wrong with your blade handles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You'll Remember

**Author's Note:**

> Recycling an old fanfic plot, _Slainte Mhath, Slainte Mhor_ , which I originally wrote for tf2. It’s only very slightly different, much to my UTTER SHAME. Took some liberties with 3D gear specifics.
> 
> Inspired by episode 16, spoilers for the Battle of Trost arc.

Something is wrong with your blade handles.  
  
You realize this in the morning while you are putting on your three-dimensional maneuver gear. Everything is routine, you can put on your full uniform in your sleep and, shit, you probably had at one point. Testing your belts and shifting the weight of the blade holsters from side to side, you check both hilts at your shoulders, fingers curling over leather and triggers. You pause.  
  
The wrapping is different.  
  
You take one in your hand, gripping it tight at your side. The handle doesn’t match the shape of your palm when it should, because the gear is yours and you wouldn’t let anyone else touch them. It feels off, like maybe you’re holding onto someone else’s hand.  
  
Like maybe you’re wanting to hold someone else’s hand.  
  
You lift the handle up for inspection, but you already you what you’re going to find. The leather wrapping is not how you usually do it. They crisscross over each other in a leveled, overlapping figure eight pattern. Perfectly within regulation, so you’ll pass muster with the sergeant but you won’t be happy about it.  
  
It's a small detail, but you prefer to wrap your grips in even loops that wind downward because you don’t have the time or patience for figure eight wraps. You’ve tried it once or twice a long time ago, but it had felt strange. This kind of little thing can mess up your entire day and become an unnecessary distraction that could cost you your life outside the walls.   
  
The sun is barely up and your fellow soldiers are still getting ready as well. You figure you can eat breakfast in five minutes, so you spend most of your morning prep taking apart the wraps over your handles and redoing them just how you want it.  
  
You’re stubborn and set in your ways. You won’t let this get to you.  
  
Test the handles again. The wraps fit just right this time, but you had been wrong; you didn’t get to finish breakfast.

* * *

The day ends with you still alive. Sasha had been in your squad and the both of you did great, all things considered. You help her out of her straps.   
  
“That was a good run,” she says, folding up her belts. “You gotta teach me that turning move later.”  
  
“It’s easy,” you say with a cocky grin. “Just time your swing and how you release air. Like this.”  
  
To demonstrate, you angle your body and pull out the hilts from their holsters. Your thumb slides up the crisscross pattern of your wrap and you almost choke.  
  
“Jean?”  
  
You don’t remember.  
  
You don’t remember if you’ve rewrapped the handles of your gear. And even if you did, you wonder where you found the time during the training mission. It doesn’t make sense, and you are trying so hard to reason this out.  
  
“Jean, are you alright?” Sasha peers at your face. She frowns, noticing that you have your eyes trained to your fist, and she gently takes the handle from your slack grip. “You look… hungry. Let’s eat first. You can show me later.”  
  
You stare at the handle in her hand. You get the feeling that she might be lying, just a little, but then you remember you didn’t have breakfast, and day rations are never really satisfying. She’s right. You’re hungry and tired, and that takes priority.  
  
“Yeah, I’m starving,” you hear yourself say, “Help me out of my gear and we can get some dinner.”

* * *

It happens again, maybe five or six more times. You check the hilts in the morning and most of the time they have the loop wrappings. Most of the time.  
  
It gets so bad that you detach the handles from their holsters and take them to bed with you. They sit on the tiny bedside table and you watch them carefully, thinking that maybe in the middle of the night you’ll catch the wrapping unravel from the loops to the figure eight.   
  
You aren’t sure when you fell asleep, but you did. Now you are waking up in the middle of the night, chest heaving, and you think you can still hear someone breathing next to you. You blindly reach for the handles, feeling for the wraps – figure eight – and bury your face into the pillow.  
  
The next thing you know you’re hurling the grips away. One clatters on the floor. The other one, you think, must have landed on a bunk.  
  
But you don’t hear the other hilt land.  
  
You want to believe someone is playing a joke on you, and you almost do when you see a shadow loom over. With a start, you turn around, gripping the hilt in a guarded position as if it had a blade attached to it. The hilt you didn’t hear land anywhere.  
  
“Uh, Jean? It’s only me,” Connie says, suddenly appearing in your field of vision. His hand is around your wrist, firm but warm.  
  
If that hilt had blade, you would have taken his head off.  
  
“Can’t sleep either?” he asks, letting your hand fall back.  
  
You grumble and put the handle back on the table, fingers twitching. Under the blankets you twist the inner sheet to keep them still.  
  
“Nightmares again?” you reply to his question with another question. Everyone has been getting nightmares since Trost.  
  
“Actually, no,” Connie says, keeping his voice low in order to not wake up the others. He kneels down on the floor, propping his elbows at the edge of your bed.  His eyes are bright and you can see the shine of his grin in the gloom. “I had a dream I was back home.”  
   
“Lucky,” you mutter wearily.  
  
“It was nice,” Connie says. “I was playing with my little brother, and we were eating a ton of berries, so my mother comes and-“  
  
Connie tells you his whole dream, meandering and getting off track the entire way. He tells you other stories about his hometown and huge family, sometimes getting loud so you have to shush him repeatedly until you finally get too tired to trying to keep him quiet.  
  
You fall asleep, exasperated, but you dream about your own family that night.

* * *

Sometimes the handles behave. They let you keep your looping wraps, but it’s on those days when you feel most on edge. You keep checking them during training and drills. Learning the long-distance formation patterns becomes difficult.   
  
“Squads will loop around each other on horseback,” the instructor says, gesturing to a diagram of circles and shapes.  
  
The word makes you look up, eyes narrowing to comprehend the information. You sigh and look back down.   
  
You are drawing figure eights all over your notes and you wonder when this will all end.

* * *

Eventually you report that your handles are broken. Reiner is with you when you receive your new pair of handles, or rather, you make sure Reiner is there.

  
“What was wrong with your old ones?” Reiner asks.  
  
“Triggers felt loose,” you lie, wrapping up the grips. Loops and circles. You hold them up. “How does that look?”  
  
You’re practically shoving them in his face. Reiner gives you a strange look, but he obliges by gripping the handles and squeezing the triggers to test them out. “Huh. You usually take really good care of your gear. It looks good. Feels fine to me, but I prefer-“  
  
“Figure eight, I fucking _know_ ,” you snap, balling your hands into fists at your sides. To your horror you start raising your voice without meaning to, but you can’t stop. “But that's just you.   _I_ like wind up wraps. That’s how I want them! I don’t want figure eights, they feel fucking weird, alright?”  
  
Your voice cracks at the end. This is it. You’ve finally gone insane. You’re so messed up you’re snapping at Reiner and Reiner doesn’t even have a clue why because it isn’t his fault. You’ve done it now.  
  
Reiner only looks at you before he nods.  His voice is calm and understanding, which somehow makes it worse.  “Sure. Different strokes, am I right?”  
  
“Just… you see they’re in loops?” you ask pathetically.  
  
“Yeah, I see them,” Reiner assures. He hands you back the hilts. “You’ve wrapped them perfectly.”

* * *

Reiner, self-appointed big brother that he is, follows you into the stables after your mission. He grips your shoulder.  
  
“Hey, you doing all right?”  
  
“Not sure,” you say. Reiner’s the steadiest person you know. You believe the whole Scouting Legion is a bag full of crazy, but you figure Reiner’s one of the least crazy of them all. You trust him to not joke around with you.  
  
You show him the handles.  
  
Reiner stares, presses his lips together, and looks a bit confused. “Decided to try the figure eight wrap?”  
  
So you’re not hallucinating after all.  
  
Tears start to well up in your eyes. Mortified, you look away and blink fast. Breathing in slowly, you say, “This morning I wrapped them in loops, right?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
You nod, accepting your questionable sanity. “Thanks.”

* * *

The Scouting Legion is known for its weirdness. The corporal is a clean freak, one squad leader has the sense of smell of a hundred hounds, another is a complete titan fan, and of course there’s that _other_ soldier who can turn into a titan on command.  
  
And you – well, you think you’re being haunted.  
  
You don’t believe in ghosts or spirits. You’ve scorned every ghost story you’ve ever heard as a kid because nothing scares you more than titans anyway.   
  
You find a quiet place at the edge of the training woods and place the handles in front of you. They’re wrapped in loops. You close your eyes, count to three, and open them.  
  
Crisscross wraps. And you haven’t even touched them. You’re not scared anymore. You’re too upset and tired to be scared.  
  
“This needs to stop,” you tell the handles.  
  
The handles don’t say anything back because they're fucking _handles_ , and you feel stupid but you’re at the end of your rope and you’re desperate to try anything.  
  
“You know, I don’t get what’s the big fucking deal with the wraps,” you say, slumping down to your knees. “Why the wraps? Loops and crisscrosses are both valid wrapping methods. I’ve never gotten even a blister with the loop method. I don’t understand why you keep _insisting_ , and making me lose sleep over this, and the fucking _nightmares_ I get over this crap-”  
  
You toe one of the handles with your boot, miserable.  
  
“Marco,” you finally say, putting your forehead to your drawn up knees, “this isn’t like you.”  
  
Nothing happens.  
  
Maybe you are expecting a light to shine in front of your eyes, maybe a ghost or an image. Maybe it’s an epiphany.  
  
“It was just that one time,” you say, muffled.  
  
The day I died, you had wrapped your handles in loops. Your triggers didn’t work, right? You’re going over that day over and over again, and somehow you latched on to this idea that the wraps really matter, somehow.  
  
You knew I did my wraps in figure eights, because I had told you, while we were still trainees, there would be less of a chance of them jamming the triggers. The wraps can slip, you know? When your palms get sweaty and the loops unravel a bit, and then I held your hand and we were quiet.  
   
But the day I died, you survived. I only helped a little. The rest you did on your own.  
  
You pick up the handles, looking at the wraps. You _do_ have the patience for this, see? I knew it. Don’t rush off to die.  
  
So maybe now you can learn to move on for this.  
  
“No, I’m not ready yet,” you say, glaring at the ground.  
  
You have _got_ to stop talking to your handles. It looks weird, but I will tell you right now you can feel the bone in your breast pocket start to burn through your skin.  
  
You take out the piece of bone. It looks small in your hand, and it has been getting tinier and tinier as time passes. The bone has been breaking off in fragments, and it scares you that perhaps one day you’ll reach into your pocket and nothing will be left.   
  
You think it’s a memento, something to remind you of me.  But you don’t have to worry about forgetting.  
  
You lower your head and listen to what I have to say.  
  
You’ll remember me in the way I taught you how to bind your gear. You’ll remember how good it feels to be alive and knowing that you _are_ alive. You’ll remember my words to you by the way you lead others, and by how you worry about them, too, in how you appreciate each person – people like Sasha who makes sure you eat your dinner even when you aren't hungry, Connie who tells you silly stories when you can’t sleep, and Reiner who watches you through missions and does his best to protect you.  
  
You aren’t exactly ready to move on yet, but that’s fine. You’ve taken a step forward. It’s a start.  
  
I hand back the handles to your gear. The wraps are crisscross, and they are finally starting to feel right in your grip. With a shaky laugh, you wipe your eyes with the cuff of your sleeve and stand up.   
  
You can do this, Jean.  
  
You let the bone fall from your palm.  It blends in well with the foliage. The weight lifts, and I can take a step back.  
  
You turn around and start walking away. You’ve got work to do, friends to thank, a new mission to prepare for.  
  
And me? You know I’ll follow until you can let me go.  



End file.
